Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  “People killed each other over land and gold and supremacy in these parts not too long ago,” Marija said as I was driving her Corvette this time on the way to Utah. “I can still smell the blood, it’s as if the orange desert rocks are this color because of all the blood impregnated in it. I want to find a piece of earth where no blood has ever been shed, a clean and virgin piece of land. Then I want to buy it.” She was smiling and radiant like the first hours after our LA encounter.

  We went on the lookout for a virgin place where no blood was shed. We acquired no better understanding of America but we found a zone of the earth where no memory of ours could implant itself and grow roots and bring our past into the present like an inevitable cataclysm. We needed to understand history and the need for blood now more than ever. Was it for power or for land that people killed and destroyed each other? Was land power? Or was power just a rush for an abstract sense of subjugation?

  “You and I don’t know anything about America, Lara. All we know about America is from the movies. It’s all stereotypes and clichés, and a few memorable lines uttered by Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, or John Wayne.” Marija laughed. I was getting used to her unpredictable passages from the darkest depths to frivolous talk about Hollywood actors or movie scenes. At some point in the trip I wanted to know what had really happened during those days in July but could not ask Marija directly. By now, I had read her notes so many times that I knew parts of them by heart, but still only really understood the aftermath, the recovery period. I wanted to go with her as deep as she would take me and feel at least part of her pain. Then maybe she would feel a bit lighter. And she wanted to know about Karim and all the rest. We both knew that the telling of our darkest places was now as necessary as the road taking us through the lunar landscapes we traversed. The stories were completely out of sync with one another, but they were each our own stories.

  “It was my idea to leave Sarajevo,” Marija said, almost screaming through the hot wind of our ride. She kept reminding herself of that like a punishment. “I thought we would be safer and we went right into the devil’s mouth and the devil chewed and swallowed us all and spat our bones back in the surrounding hills. The UN said it was a ‘safe zone’ and stupid me, I trusted the UN. There was actually a resolution with a number attached to it that declared it an area of safety, meaning where people could take refuge and be secure from harm. The best lesson I learned was that whenever the UN declares something safe, you should run in the opposite direction. I was to blame for the massacre of my family and it’s up to me to decide whether I can live with that or not.” Her voice trailed in the wind, it sliced the quivering dry heat like a sharp blade, it circled our heads like a famished vulture, it rested on my heart.

  “You and I can never get away from the Balkans, you know that, right, Lara dear?”

  “I thought we just did, Marija dear. This is not the fucking Balkans and you know it,” I went on with conviction. “For all the bloody episodes in these parts, for all the feuds, the massacres, in the end they got it right. Or they got it better than our people. Do you see anybody running for refuge in the other direction, from here to there? Do you know anybody from New Mexico or Utah immigrating to Bosnia or Serbia?”

  “It’s just that they have more land, that’s all, look at all this! There’s enough for everybody. In the fucking Balkans everybody’s crowded on top of one another until you want to kill your neighbor and their mother. And anyway it’s the fucking Wild West. Why do you think they call it Wild? These are lands acquired and built through the power of the guns. First taken from the Indians, then from the Mexicans, it’s what Westerns are made of. And none of that will ever change the fact that I am responsible for the death of my family.” She slammed on the brakes at a dusty tiny gas station. I restrained from saying anything. What could I have said, a meager: No, Marija, you didn’t kill your family, the Serbs of Republika Srpska killed your family and hurt you and the UN tricked everybody because they were incompetent and evil and you are no more responsible for what happened to them than Pam’s twins or Sally Bryant are responsible for the Bosnian war? She had probably heard all that from Sally Bryant, from Ferida, from women in the rehabilitation center and countless other people.

  “It dragged out for a while,” she said, nonchalantly filling up the gas tank. The sky was always impenetrably blue and immense and the dry air scratched your lungs. Marija, wearing a yellow dress, looked majestic framed by the blue sky and the red awning of the gas station. I had no idea that if you survived the worst you could emerge as a thing of beauty. Indomitable and frightening, but beautiful nevertheless. “I said let’s leave Sarajevo, and let’s go to the country, it’s safe there, that’s what I said. And we all went to the house in the country where we thought it was safe. Just like we think it’s safe out here. And before we knew it they were butchering us.”

  I thought I heard hyenas in the distance, saw vultures circling above, felt scorpions swarming at my feet. Nothing was safe. The gas station with the red awning was shifting in the sun and the immobility of the place was hypnotic. Life hung on so little. A scorpion, a man with a gun, a crater opening up, at any moment we walked a thin line across the abyss. It was all just a matter of where you found yourself at a particular moment in time.

  “I killed a man in the ambush,” she said with a weird grin looking at me across her red Corvette. “And it’s the best thing I have ever done. Only that it cost me everything.” The man in the red pickup truck next to the red awning of the gas station was smoking a cigarette and looking at us. We looked foreign. We were Balkan, we came from recent wars and fresh massacres. Just like everybody who came from a place with a history of massacre, only the layout of our land was different. And we had an accent.

  Marija said she had also saved a young girl’s life in what she called the ambush. She killed the man that had attacked the young girl, the daughter of their neighbor. She killed the man with a gun that she found on the ground. And the girl survived, she ran and disappeared. The next soldier got Marija. Other soldiers, too, were there for the revenge. The soldier beside the one that Marija had killed grabbed her and then all the rest. Her parents and grandparents were all lying on the ground at that point. Both her maternal and paternal grandparents. All six closest people of her family, an entire family erased from the face of the earth in a matter of minutes under a ferociously blue sky, like the wide vault above our heads in this desert land with a gas station with its red awning and its red gas pumps. A hundred years had passed between the killing and the soldier grabbing Marija to avenge the death of his buddy. An entire geological era passed when the earth dried up, then flooded, then froze, then burned, then the cacti bloomed again shamelessly out of the desert sand.

  She was in the woman’s house when she woke up with the crushed optic nerve. The woman had found her in the evening still breathing on the ground next to her massacred family as she crept out of her house a bit farther down the road. She practically dragged Marija to her house and she was still alive when she got there though bleeding profusely from her eye. The woman took care of her and her wounds day and night. Until the birth, the woman from Semizovac kept moving her from town to town, from house to house, like she was in an unclear chase by someone. She was Bosnian Muslim posing as Serbian. The woman who had saved Marija’s life was acting Serbian while running away from the Serbs and she was dragging Marija after her. She sang Serbian songs throughout all the moves and the rides. The woman went from place to place, driving her ancient Yugo car that occasionally dropped off parts along the way, with Marija bleeding all over the backseat. Finally the woman found a recently lived-in house on the non-Muslim edge of a town. They stayed there for a while and seven months later it was where Marija gave birth, while the woman cleaned her up and sang Serbian songs at the top of her lungs to make sure the remaining neighbors or any Srpska soldiers passing by thought they were Serbs.

  “Land and women have always been for the taking,” she said looking up
at the sky as if defying it. She lit up a cigarette next to the gas pump. In the quivering heat of the desert we could have all blown up at the mere spark of a cigarette. Life hung on a tiny gesture, on a silk thread, on a snap of one’s fingers. At Marija’s side, I, too, was part of generations of avengers, war starters, desert fighters, and killers. It felt cool like fresh springwater. “I am probably the only civilian woman in Bosnia who killed a Serbian soldier. I deserve a fucking medal!” Marija’s voice and laugh were raw and unforgiving. I felt incomprehensible joy at Marija’s news that she had killed a soldier. Women of the Wild West had killed attackers and killers before us in the heat of an ambush, not thinking twice, not praying or hesitating. Out here in the Wild West, the cacti were sharp as blades, their flowers luscious as bleeding hearts.

  “How did it feel to kill a man, Marija?” I noticed that the man filling up his truck looked at us. The gun rack was filled. He heard my question to Marija. “It felt right, it felt damn good to kill the bastard.” The man stared at us again and muttered something. It looked like he was going to take out his gun and shoot at us. This new Balkan Thelma and Louise movie might end right here, with the two girls shot at a gas station near a canyon, their brains unromantically splattered all over red gas pumps. But instead the man let out a sinister laugh. We climbed back into the convertible without even opening the doors and screeched out of the gas station in a cloud of dust.

  When I put Marija’s wallet back in her bag as she asked me to, I thought I felt a gun. I did! And I pulled it out and looked at it wide-eyed: a small handgun, almost pretty, almost feminine. “That’s right, Lara dear, it’s a gun, I always carry a gun with me now.” I gently put the gun back into Marija’s bag. I had nothing to say. The ride was smooth again and now we were crossing back into Colorado and passing by the shimmering aspen forests. We greeted the light greens with joy, we had bled enough, we had had enough of the oranges and the reds of the arid desert.

  Marija found a piece of land in the Wild West and bought it. We now had our own sliver of American land. We felt like bona fide Americans. On our way through the western landscapes we’d passed by a place in the Rockies that had a FOR SALE sign. It was a mixture of desert and pasture, forest and plain, rock and meadow, it had everything. And a lake farther up that glistened in the sun. A forest of aspen trees with glimmering tiny emerald leaves framed it. There was a tiny log cabin sitting on that piece of land like an old sage. It was as easy as buying a pair of cowboy boots at the general store. Marija paid part in cash and part with a check. She carried a big chunk of cash in her large white bag right next to the handgun, along with a mini Webster’s Dictionary and the picture of the blond son standing by the well. “You couldn’t do this in the Balkans. Only in America! We just got a bit closer to the meaning of America, didn’t we? We own a tiny portion of it now. It’s all in the ownership, right? Possession is fifty percent of the law, isn’t that what they say in America?” Her laugh resonated across the variegated landscape like a magic song.

  We stayed for three nights and three days in the log cabin. We slept on the floor in sleeping bags and Marija cried the whole time. The rooms smelled of pine and we could see a piece of a sharp peak and ponderosa pine forest from the cabin window. “We never had a chance to say good-bye,” she said lying on her back, staring out the small window at the shard of raw blue outside. “You know, Mama and Papa, Kemal and Farah. The night before, Papa played the flute, he went through some of his classical repertoire from Haydn to Mozart to Strauss. He even played Ravel, and I had never heard Ravel on the flute. It sounded unearthly. We felt almost safe. Kemal smoked his last pipe. Farah drank her last coffee. Mama sewed her last embroidery stitches. Papa played his last tune. We went to bed. We heard voices at night but we thought it was the UN peacekeeping soldiers. We went back to sleep, all in one room. I had a dream about children playing in a garden outside of Sarajevo. The dream was beautiful but in it something felt rotten and hideous. There were only children in this area of Sarajevo, no adults anywhere in sight, and something terrifying was lurking in the background, a slimy headless monster. But when I woke up I refused to pay attention to the bad parts of the dream and just remembered the beautiful part about the children playing in a blissful garden. It reminded me of us three playing around Kemal and Farah’s house in the summer. I thought it was a sign that peace would come soon. In the morning we were all restless. I said, ‘Let’s stay for another few days, we’ll be okay, after all they declared this to be a safe zone.’ It was the first time I didn’t follow my intuitions and premonitions and decided to listen to the party line, the news, the dirty war communications. I should have known better. In the morning, they broke down the door and barged in. We saw the Serbian uniforms, and Mama said she hoped it would be fast. They dragged us all outside. Farah and Kemal were caught by surprise but Mama and Papa knew what was happening. I had the time to hold Mama’s hand one brief second, right before they tore us apart from each other. For some crazy reason I was wearing your turquoise necklace. For all I know it saved my life. The soldier that I killed was our next-door neighbor in Semizovac. You might have even seen him that summer when you and I went there for one weekend when we were in college, remember? The girl he attacked was our other next-door neighbor. So much for love your neighbor as thyself.”

  She had said everything almost in a whisper yet incredibly clear in crisp words like crystal beads bouncing off the walls in the log cabin in the mellow light that came through the tiny window. I thought she had fallen asleep because she lay without moving for what seemed like a long time. Then Marija cried, for three days and three nights. This time she didn’t cry with torrents and sobs like she had before. Her cries were now mellow and rhythmic like a song to sadness. A serenade to the world’s most inconsolable sadness. She cried through her sleep and through the gulps of water I made her drink, through every moment of those three days she cried to the point where I thought she would die from crying. At some moments her cries were intolerable and I thought it might be better for Marija to die. I thought it would be easier for both of us and that she could never survive and bear all that grief for the years to come. But on the third day she stopped as abruptly as she had started. By then I was so used to the sound of her song to sadness that I almost missed it. I had never known such turmoil of mind, soul, and body as during those three days and nights. Yet when Marija stopped it was like she had woken up from the deepest sleep on earth. She was steady on her feet, determined in her actions, and clear in her speech. And she could always smile. We went for a walk on one of the trails near our cabin that morning. We climbed next to sparkly gurgling streams and majestic ponderosa pines through slivers of light and reckless blue. “We have never been here before, I am sure of it. All this is new, a new day,” whispered Marija, and her face shone with beauty and love. I took her hand and we embraced in the shifting light, enveloped in the ponderosa pine scent. Marija’s eyelashes fluttered against my cheeks like silk butterflies, everything melted in the spruce and ponderosa greens. Her lips were soft and honey-sweet as I remembered from our childhood. We had never been there, maybe there had never been any bloodshed where we stood and embraced, maybe we started a new America.

  We decided it was time to go back to my other home in America. On our drive home, it was my turn to talk. Marija wanted to hear everything. I would tell her about Karim, Mark, and the trial. I didn’t really feel like sinking into all the mire of my past and reliving the guilt, the breakage, the fear of losing Natalia, and the shamefulness of Karim’s betrayal. But to her it was calming to hear stories of love and betrayal, divorce and legal proceedings, couples’ misunderstandings and family feuds. It was like watching episodes of Dallas when we were young: the heartaches and family upheavals of the rich and famous from the perspective of our Communist Yugoslavia. My sagas meant to her a normal life in times of peace. Only that paradoxically enough, she considered my divorce, love affair, and custody trials with the same weight and grief as her own past. I
t didn’t make sense to me, but to Marija it meant that everybody lived with their own burden depending on their circumstances and destiny. Despite her rationality and atheism she was a fierce believer in destiny. The drive was long, and the swaying American highways made me begin to fiercely miss my corner of banal living in my soon-to-be-lost American apartment. The quick pit stops with bearded truck drivers staring at us, the overweight waitresses with badly bleached hair, the smell of hot dogs or fried chicken in the early hours of the morning made me queasy and sad about living in a foreign country. Sometimes I remembered that Marija carried a dainty gun in her white glossy bag and that made me feel safer and more grounded. Maybe I was more American than I thought. I knew that if it came down to it and if we were to be accosted, insulted, attacked in any way, she would have no hesitation about using it.